It’s Saturday, which means that it’s probably time to tinker with WordPress again, just don’t break anything. Just as a precautionary measure, here’s a great presentation from Hanni Ross at this year’s WordCamp San Francisco on the five most common ways to break and fix your blog.

Are you eager to know what’s going on in the minds of the WordPress core developers? This Q&A with the core developers themselves was a great treat for those present at this year’s WordCamp San Francisco and has a wealth of intriguing questions from the community. It’s definitely worth the hour if you’re interested in some of the recent and future WordPress decisions and plans.

The weekend is just around the corner, so it may be time for yet another fun project on your WordPress blog. Are you one of the millions of bloggers using the default theme with absolutely no customizations? Are you interested in perhaps modifying it just a little to stand out from the crowd? At this year’s WordCamp San Francisco, Jane Wells gave a great presentation with an outstanding Q & A to highlight some of the basics of theme customization. If this doesn’t inspire you to change at least one element in your theme, you must really love your current theme.

BuddyPress has been quickly moving to a major update in version 1.5. There have been hundreds of bug fixes, and steps have been takes to make BuddyPress 1.5 much more efficient and secure than its predecessor, but what are the noticeable changes that users can look forward to? Lead BuddyPress developer John James Jacoby took some time at this year’s WordCamp San Francisco to share what’s new in BuddyPress 1.5.

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg was interviewed by John Battelle on Signal Austin. The discussion is quite broad, ranging from the supposed death of blogging, to Jetpack, to privacy and security. It’s actually a rather entertaining interview with some thought-provoking and honest answers to some tough questions.

WordPress has come a long way since 2003, and this handy video from Jon Cave traces every step along the way. Don’t miss a beat when things really start to heat up in 2005 as work begins on WordPress 2.

If you attempted to upload an audio or video file to a post in WordPress, you may notice that all you get is a link to download the file. If you want the file to actually play, you’ll need to use an extra plugin. By far, the most popular audio plugin is WordPress Audio Player. Video plugins are significantly less popular, probably because video files take up so much space and bandwidth, and it’s so easy to embed videos from external providers. When embedding audio and video, I prefer to use the Degradable HTML5 Audio and Video Plugin. Sure, it may require some file conversion, but it’s a great way to embed both audio and video files that use the browser’s native (non-Flash) player while also providing the option of a Flash-based player for browsers that don’t support HTML5 embeds. If you’d rather embed videos from an external provider, it’s […]

This weekend will be packed with WordCamp goodness starting with WordCamp Phoenix on Friday the 13th and WordCamp New York on Saturday the 14th as well as Sunday the 15th, both of which still have tickets available. However, if you can not make it to WordCamp Phoenix, the great news is that it will be live video streamed in its entirety thanks to their sponsorship with GoDaddy. Simply point your browsers to their Live Video page and the event will be streamed starting at 9AM Mountain time. Also check out the schedule of events in case you only want to tune in during a certain session. Because of a lack of WiFi and bandwidth at WordCamp New York, there will be no live audio or video streams. *UPDATE* Just found out that WordCamp Victoria in Canada is also this weekend.

WordPress.com 2.5 Essential Training at lynda.com Online Training Library® is a set of training videos by Maria Langer (who also happens to be a professional helicopter pilot) that walk through the setup and use of WordPress as a blogging tool. Sadly, the title of this set of videos might be a bit misleading (though the title does indeed say WordPress.com, I was taken by the version number in the title) since the videos are tailored for WordPress.com blogs and not for self hosted WordPress.org blogs. However, a few of the initial videos are offered for free download and the only option for purchase of the full set is via a monthly subscription for $25 which would give the user access to all the videos on lynda.com. There are plans to sell the videos as a CDROM for purchase but those are not available as of this post. The videos are […]

About the Author

James

James began using WordPress in 2004. Being new to WordPress (and blogging in general), he quickly found the WordPress Support Forums and basically never left. James currently resides in sunny Southern California, where he enjoys bringing happiness to millions of WordPress.com users.